Coming clean on Fallingwater

For anyone interested in architecture or anyone who has visited Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece outside Pittsburgh, this book is a must.

Architectural historian Franklin Toker's "Fallingwater Rising" is a detailed, juicy story about Wright and the E.J. Kaufmann family, owners of a large department-store chain who wanted a weekend house near a stream on land that once was the store's employee summer camp.

"Fallingwater Rising" could only have been written after 1989, the year the Kaufmanns' son, Edgar Jr., died in New York. A former Museum of Modern Art design curator and Columbia University architectural history professor, Edgar Jr. spent years lying about his own and his father's role in the inception, design and building of Fallingwater.

Toker sets the record straight on a number of points that have become legends and myths about the celebrated house over a waterfall, delineating these truths: Edgar Jr. was kicked out of Wright's studio, Taliesin, because of homosexual capers. Edgar Sr. was already in touch with Wright about designing a weekend house in 1934, long before his son claimed to have put the two together.

The name itself, Fallingwater, contains a hidden acronym for Wright's initials, FLW. The mother, Liliane (who changed the spelling of her name after she met Liliane de Rothschild in Europe in the 1920s), probably did not commit suicide at Fallingwater but inadvertently overdosed from a sleeping drug and liquor.

The famous cantilevered, overhanging balconies were indeed poorly designed and constructed despite Wright's endless reassurances; extensive shoring up had to be undertaken in the 1990s. And, finally, Ayn Rand's best-selling novel "The Fountainhead" was indeed based on Wright and included a character like Edgar Sr. and a house like Fallingwater. (Wright designed a house for Rand, too, which didn't hurt.)

Although Wright designed 169 pieces of furniture for the house, Edgar and Liliane installed hundreds more items of furnishing and art once they took possession in November 1937.

In this respect, Fallingwater was a showplace for the department store's products. Art by Jacques Lipchitz, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jean Arp and others was prominently displayed. Giacometti was commissioned to design the bronze doors for the family crypt nearby in 1954. (When I visited the house in 1984, I saw a priceless 1960 Peter Voulkos pot casually shoved into a corner near the swimming pool.)

How did Fallingwater become the most famous house of the past century, eclipsing residences by Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, not to mention William Randolph Hearst's absurdly grandiose San Simeon? With publicity, pure and simple.

Coinciding with the rise of mass media, Kaufmann's department-store public-relations staff controlled national, and then international, coverage of the house with carefully placed photographs in Time, Life and Architectural Forum magazines, as well as Hearst's magazine House Beautiful. The junior Kaufmann continued in the 1960s after his parents' deaths with his own distorted book, lectures, courses, interviews, a film and special touring exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (to which his father had donated heavily).

Experts say Fallingwater should be visited four times, once for each season, because of the amazing natural beauty surrounding it.

Junior's greatest accomplishment was, we now know, not bringing together Wright and his father but securing and protecting the house as a museum by donating it and the land to the nonprofit Western Pennsylvania Nature Conservancy.

When he returned to visit it, he would stay nearby with the Mellons, the same family that had long made sure his Jewish father could not join any of Pittsburgh's elite social and sporting clubs. In the end, apparently, all Edgar Sr. had wanted by commissioning Fallingwater was some "respect." He eventually got that and a lot more.